(WIP) Durd's hideout

[Iluf]

Greetings to fellow modders and Skyrim players! Here goes yet another guy looking for opinions on his creation.

 

A bit of an introduction, to begin with. I initially started creating my own game content in Warcraft II and HoMM2 in 1997. Although I was still in my childhood, I did enjoy the process immensely, and continued my experiments by making maps in other games that followed WCII and HoMM. What I never did was publishing anything I've made to be available to a wide audience. Eventually I started participating in different activities and stopped designing anything on my own. Until Skyrim came.

After playing the game with and without mods mods for 350+ hours, I have finally decided to resurrect my creative side and try making making a mod or two of my own.

 

So, after a bit of reading up on tutorials, I started making my first module, Durd's Hideout. In its current form, it's still too raw and unfinished for me to even think of publishing it openly on Steam or on the mainpage here, but what I can do (and what I think might help me a lot with inspiration and figuring out what to do further) is advertise it a bit here and get some feedback from people who frequent these forums.

 

Click here for the latest version of the mod.

 

The premise of the mod:

A small(ish) cave is located between Falkreath and Riverwood which can serve as a hideout for the player until getting a proper home, but comes with a twist: it is already populated by a dumb-but-tough bandit and his wife/lover. The bandit is a seasoned fighter and will be an extremely hard opponent for any fresh adventurer (i.e. straight out of Helgen). The bandit, however, has pissed off a group of guys who can also qualify as "an opposing bandit faction but is not instantly hostile because less dumb", and it just happens that these people are about to attempt a takedown on the owner of the cave as the player walks in (the woes of stupid quest design). The player is then prompted to either help the welcoming party, mind his/her own business and walk on by, or attack the strangers.

 

http://i.imgur.com/7YXqI.png

 

(you can also type "coc aaidurdexterior" in the console)

 

The idea was to make this mod a bit less hack and slashey as most of the dungeon content the vanilla game has to offer: it is possible for the player to go out of the cave quite a bit happier and richer without fighting at all (which will most likely allow the player to then get a new home in a more civil way). It's also meant to be a bit more realistic than usual, since the bandits aren't actually dying in two hits, the loot chests are seriously locked using keys (still possible to unlock using lockpicks but *tough*) and the keys are not always lying right next to the chests they unlock. It's also very short and is going to take you less than 15 minutes to complete.

 

SO! I'm looking for any feedback. Read the description, or download and play it, or dissect it in CK, but I will be a very very happy panda if you take some time to comment on it. Thank you in advance!

 

To-Do for the time being:

- Fix the scripts so the whole adventuring party behaves as intended

- Voiceovers for the dialogue

- Itemize the chests (empty for now, d'oh!)

- Make the skeever traverse around the cave in a manner that doesn't start a local turf war

Edited August 14, 2012 by Iluf